AMERICAN NOTES: Thinning the Veil

Since World War II, Government
secrecy has developed into a pervasive bureaucratic habit, an ominous
development for a system of, by and for the people. It reached the
point where Defense Department subalterns were classifying newspaper
clippings, administrators used their SECRET stamps to conceal waste and
stupidity, and the vaults of Washington were choked with millions of
pages of momentous or banal information that the public was paying
millions of dollars a year for the privilege of never seeing.

Last week, after more than a year's review of Government secrecy, the
White House overhauled the classification procedures for the first...